impress of his versatile genius upon his palaces at Agra, the new capital which he built at Fatehpur-Sikri, and his tomb at Sikandra. His great fame and the wealth of his treasury must have attracted craftsmen from all the cities of Asia. Akbar himself was eager to enlarge the range of his knowledge, and in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of his court, where Christians, Jews, Brahmans, Zoroastrians, and Musalmans disputed with each other, and every foreigner who had new ideas to offer was welcome, he had ample opportunity of making himself acquainted with the style of buildings in other countries, but he had no desire to pose as a foreigner or to introduce Mongolian fashions. His new capital was laid out on strictly Indian lines—like one of the royal cities of Rajputana—the Jami Masjid, with its towering gate of victory (Pl. XXXIX, a), taking the place of a Vishnu temple, but oriented in the same way. It is only in some of the decorative details that Persian and perhaps Chinese influence is visible. The symbolic design of his throne chamber in the private hall of audience (Dīwān-i-Khās), where he sat upon a massive Vishnu pillar as a Chakravartin, or ruler of the four quarters, is entirely Indo-Aryan, for Akbar's ambition was to obliterate all sense of foreign domination in the minds of his subjects, and to dissolve religious controversies in a common feeling of loyalty to "a most just, a most wise, and a most God-fearing king."[1] And in having his own tomb at Sikandra planned after the model of an Indian five-storied assembly-hall,
- ↑ For an account of Akbar's reign and his political and religious ideals, see History of Aryan Rule in India, by the Author (Harrap & Co.), pp. 450-557. The buildings at Fatehpur-Sikri are described in the Author's Handbook to Agra and the Tāj (Longmans), and in Indian Architecture (Murray).
